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    Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America - Updated Edition
    Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America - Updated Edition
    Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America - Updated Edition
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    Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America - Updated Edition

    By Mae M. Ngai

    4.5/5

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    This book traces the origins of the "illegal alien" in American law and society, explaining why and how illegal migration became the central problem in U.S. immigration policy—a process that profoundly shaped ideas and practices about citizenship, race, and state authority in the twentieth century. Mae Ngai offers a close reading of the legal regime of restriction that commenced in the 1920s—its statutory architecture, judicial genealogies, administrative enforcement, differential treatment of European and non-European migrants, and long-term effects. She shows that immigration restriction, particularly national-origin and numerical quotas, remapped America both by creating new categories of racial difference and by emphasizing as never before the nation's contiguous land borders and their patrol.

    Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateApr 27, 2014
    ISBN9781400850235
    Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America - Updated Edition

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    • 4/5
      The various ways in which the law constructed and racialized “illegality” over the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A telling example: in the mid-twentieth century, noncitizens who’d committed minor crimes but had lived in the US for decades could sometimes get relief from deportation by exiting the US and reentering—but only on the Canadian border; the option was not made available to Mexicans. Ngai’s organizing conceit is that the law both made “illegality” inevitable and yet excluded unlawful migrants from the category of people with rights, thus producing an “impossible” subject. I never really got that; it is obviously not at all impossible to have a category of rightsless people subject to the will of the state. It’s just truly awful.
    • 5/5
      In Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America, Maw M. Ngai “argues that illegal immigration is not anomalous but inherent to the regime of immigration restriction. Nor is it a side channel to the main stream of the nation’s history as a ‘nation of immigrants’” (pg. xxiv). Ngai organizes her book into four sections: the quota system and paper legality; immigration at the margins of law and nation; war, nationalism, and citizenship; and postwar immigration reform. Her subjects broadly alternate between Asian immigrants from Japan and China, with a section on the Philippines, and immigrants from Mexico. Further, Ngai employs a transnational approach, situating her work within recent borderlands scholarship.In discussing restriction, Ngai writes, “Restriction not only marked a new regime in the nation’s immigration policy; [she] argue[s] that it was also deeply implicated in the development of twentieth-century American ideas and practices about citizenship, race, and the nation-state” (pg. 3). According to Ngai, the quota system “constructed a white American race, in which persons of European descent shared a common whiteness distinct from those deemed to be not white. In the construction of that whiteness, the legal boundaries of both white and nonwhite acquired sharper definition” (pg. 25). Discussing early twentieth century Americans’ fears over Filipino immigration, which they equated with a threat to job opportunities, Ngai writes, “The perception of widespread job competition was, in fact, fueled by longstanding racial animus towards Asiatics. The central element of this hostility was the ideology of white entitlement to the resources of the West” (pg. 109). Discussing migrant Mexican labor, Ngai “argues that immigration law and practices were central in shaping the modern political economy of the Southwest, one based on commercial agriculture, migratory farm labor, and the exclusion of Mexican migrants and Mexican Americans from the mainstream of American society” (pg. 128). Further, Ngai argues “that this transnational Mexican labor force, and especially its bracero and ‘wetback’ constituents, constituted a kind of ‘imported colonialism’ that was a legacy of the nineteenth-century American conquest of Mexico’s northern territories” (pg. 129). Ngai’s discussion of Japanese internment demonstrates the clash between the federal and state governments’ belief in immigrants’ duty to assimilate and Japanese-Americans’ desire to blend their culture with that of the United States (pg. 180). Their uncertain legal status further compounded this. While the United States relaxed its immigration restrictions on China during World War II, “Cold War politics and the sensationalized investigations against fraud reproduced racialized perceptions that all Chinese immigrants were illegal and dangerous. Confession legalized Chinese paper immigrants, but it did not necessarily bring them social legitimacy” (pg. 223). In her final section, Ngai argues “that the thinking that impelled immigration reform in the decades following World War II developed along a trajectory that combined liberal pluralism and nationalism” (pg. 230). She also examines the unforeseen consequences of those policies, such as the intellectual “brain drain” of the Third World.Ngai draws upon the “intellectual and editorial interventions” of Gary Gerstle, author of American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (pg. xvii). This links her to other historians, such as John Dower, who argued in War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War, that World War II was a race war, and to Lawrence Goldstone’s Inherently Unequal: The Betrayal of Equal Rights by the Supreme Court, 1865-1903, which, like Ngai’s examples, examined the court cases that stripped non-white Americans of their rights or citizenship.
    • 5/5
      Insightful historical perspective on the issues of migration, politics, and second-class citizenship status. A must read for anyone seeking to understand immigration laws, policies, and the reasons for hostility towards migrants.
    • 4/5
      Excellent work examining immigration law and how it shapes and is shaped by American national self-image. She starts with attempts to limit immigration of non-whites through census manipulation, before examining specific reactions to substantial Mexican and Filipino immigration. Ngai effectively demonstrates how US racism and economic motivations dominated immigration law. She also demonstrates its inherent irrationality, particularly in looking at all the unintended consequences of immigration restriction. An excellent read for anyone who is interested in the development of immigration law and its relationship to national politics.

    Book preview

    Impossible Subjects - Mae M. Ngai

    IMPOSSIBLE SUBJECTS

    ____________________________________________________

    POLITICS AND SOCIETY IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICA

    Series Editors

    WILLIAM CHAFE, GARY GERSTLE, LINDA GORDON, AND JULIAN ZELIZER

    A list of titles in this series appears at the back of the book

    Mae M. Ngai

    IMPOSSIBLE SUBJECTS

    ILLEGAL ALIENS AND THE MAKING OF MODERN AMERICA

    PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS         PRINCETON AND OXFORD

    Copyright © 2004 by Princeton University Press

    Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

    In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street,

    Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

    All Rights Reserved

    First printing, 2004

    Fourth printing and first paperback printing, 2005

    New paperback edition, with a new foreword by the author 2014

    Paperback ISBN 978-0-691-16082-5

    Library of Congress Control Number 2013957460

    British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

    This book has been composed in Minion Typeface

    Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

    www.press.princeton.edu

    Printed in the United States of America

    10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

    To the memory of

    Shihhsun Ngai

    and to

    Hsueh-hwa Wang Ngai and

    Michael S. Hing

    It has always been easier, it always

    will be easier, to think of someone as

    a noncitizen than to

    decide that he is a nonperson.

    —ALEXANDER BICKEL, Citizenship in the American Constitution

    Table of Contents

    Figures and Illustrations

    Tables

    Acknowledgments

    THIS BOOK has multiple histories. One is common to many first academic books: it began as a humble graduate school seminar paper, evolved into a dissertation, and then, with expansion and revision, finally matured into a book that one sends into the world with hopes that thoughtful people will find in it something useful. But it also has another genealogy, with origins not in the university but in family and community. As the daughter of Chinese immigrants, I grew up in a home where being Chinese and being American existed in tension, but not in contradiction. I later spent not a few years in New York’s Chinatown community and labor movement as an activist and professional labor educator. In many ways my experience with immigrant workers and their struggles for legitimacy and equality motivated and sustained this study.

    Nevertheless, this has been principally a project of historical scholarship, and I am indebted, first, to my teachers. At the State University of New York’s Empire State College, the mecca of returning students, Robert Carey reintroduced me to reading history and suggested that I might think about going to graduate school. I thank my professors at Columbia University who taught me to read and write history: Elizabeth Blackmar, Alan Brinkley, Richard Bushman, Barbara J. Fields, Joshua Freeman, and Ira Katznelson. My biggest debt is to my advisor, Eric Foner, a great scholar, model teacher, and committed public intellectual, who took a chance by admitting a union organizer to the graduate program.

    Many archivists and librarians eased my way through the labyrinths of archival research. I thank Robert Ellis at the National Archives in Washington; Waverly Lowell at the National Archives, Pacific regional branch, in San Francisco, California; Dr. Dorothy Cordova at the Filipino American National Historical Society in Seattle; Margo Gutíerrez at the Bensen Latin American Collection at the University of Texas-Austin; and the archivists and librarians at the Bancroft Library at the University of California-Berkeley; the National Archives at College Park, Maryland, and Northeast regional branch in New York City; the presidential libraries of Harry S. Truman, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and John F. Kennedy; the Herbert Lehman Library at Columbia University; the U.S. Library of Congress; the George Meany Memorial Archives in Silver Spring, Maryland; the Walter Reuther Labor and Urban History Archives at Wayne State University; and the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota.

    I am especially grateful to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service for granting me access to its subject files. As all historians know, it is a rare fortune to have the opportunity to consult previously unresearched records. This project would not have been possible without INS historian Marian Smith’s commitment to the scholarly research of INS records. I am most grateful for her professionalism, patience, and good cheer during the months that I spent in her library and in response to the many queries I made during the years since. I thank Crystal Williams for her help with INS illustrations. Most (although not all) of the records I consulted at the INS central office have since been transferred to the National Archives in Washington (Record Group 85). At this writing much of the collection remains unprocessed, but researchers may request documents according to the information in my citations. Records that remain in the custody of the INS are so indicated.

    Generous fellowships and grants supported additional research and writing of the book. I gratefully acknowledge the Social Science Research Council International Migration Program; New York University School of Law Samuel I. Goleib Fellowship in Legal History and NYU Asian Pacific American Studies; and the University of Chicago Division of Social Sciences.

    I have benefited from support and constructive criticism from a wide circle of scholars in history, law, Asian American and Latino and Latina studies, and other fields. For reading all or parts of the penultimate draft of the manuscript I am grateful to Linda Bosniak, Gordon H. Chang, David L. Eng, Cindy Hahamovitch, Victoria Hattam, Matthew Jacobson, and Leti Volpp. Many people helped me by directing me to sources, reading drafts, correcting errors, and sharing their ideas and their own works in progress with me, and I thank them all: Jacqueline Bhabha, Beth Bates, Susan Carter, Gabriel J. Chin, Michael Dawson, Nicholas DeGenova, Mary Dudziak, Tami Friedman, Neil Gotanda, Ramón Gutíerrez, Charles Hawley, John Higham, Madeline Hsu, Erika Lee, Him Mark Lai, Adam McKeown, Rebecca McLennan, Nancy Morawetz, Gerald Neuman, Brian Niiya, Franklin Odo, Gary Y. Okihiro, Kunal Parker, Marc Simon Rodríguez, David Roediger, Teemu Ruskola, Lucy Salyer, George Sánchez, Dorothee Schneider, Paul A. Schor, Nayan Shah, Betty Lee Sung, Richard Sutch, John Kuo-wei Tchen, Christopher Tomlins, John Torpey, Dorothy Wang, Patrick Weil, Kevin Scott Wong, Kariann Yokota, Henry Yu, Michael Zakim, and Aristide Zolberg. I am saddened that Yuji Ichioka, who encouraged and advised me over the years, passed away before this book was published.

    Colleagues in history and in other disciplines at the University of Chicago have become some of my closest interlocutors. For their intellectual generosity and collegiality I thank Danielle Allen, Leora Auslander, Kyeong-hee Choi, Cathy Cohen, Bruce Cumings, Prasenjit Duara, Norma Field, Michael Geyer, Friedrich Katz, Emilio Kouri, Tetsuo Najita, William Novak, Julie Saville, Saskia Sassen, and Amy Dru Stanley. I wish to especially thank Thomas Holt and George Chauncey for their mentorship and Kathleen Neils Conzen, chair of the Department of History, and Richard Saller, former dean of the Division of Social Sciences and now provost of the university, for both intellectual and institutional support. I thank Aaron Shapiro, Deborah Cohen, Michael Stamm, and Michael Hing for research assistance.

    I had the opportunity to present early versions of chapters at numerous workshops, seminars, and conferences. For their many suggestions I thank participants in the University of Chicago’s Social History, Globalization, and Reproduction of Race and Racial Ideologies workshops; participants at annual meetings of the Law and Society Association, American Society for Legal History, Social Science History Association, and the Organization of American Historians; and participants at the American Bar Foundation seminar, New School Graduate Faculty seminar in political science, New York University workshop on the history of women and gender, New York University School of Law legal history colloquium, University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign migration studies group, Newberry Library seminar on labor history, and New York–area Asian American women’s writing group.

    My editors at Princeton University Press have been tremendously supportive. I thank the editors of the Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America series—William Chafe, Linda Gordon, Julian Zelizer, and especially Gary Gerstle, whose intellectual and editorial interventions made this an altogether better book. I thank my editor at Princeton, Brigitta van Rheinberg, who went to bat for this project at the earliest stage, and Gail Schmitt, who expertly managed the production process.

    Finally, I thank professional colleagues, friends, and family members who each made a unique contribution to my ability to complete this project: Joseph McDermott, Bill Lynch, Jean Yonemura Wing, Eric Shtob and Sonia Collins, Stephen Brier and Teresa Karamanos, Carolyn Wong, May Ying Chen, Katie Quan, Alex Hing, Marion Thom, Kim Fellner and Alec Dubro, Eric Wakin and Michelle Barc, Tracy Lai and Stan Shikuma, Marc and Patty Favreau, Elizabeth Hegeman, John G. New, Chiu-hwa Wang, Janet Ngai and David Harris, John Ngai and Lisa Brunet. I dedicate this book to the memory of my father, Shih-hsun Ngai, and to my mother, Hsueh-hwa Wang Ngai, both exemplars of moral and academic integrity; and to my son, Michael Hing, who remains my joy and my inspiration.

    I am grateful to everyone who helped make this a better book. All errors are mine.

    Parts of this book were previously published and are reprinted here in revised or expanded form. Chapter 1 was published in abridged form as The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law: A Re-Examination of the Immigration Act of 1924 in Journal of American History 89 (1999), and appears here with permission of the editors. Chapter 2 was published as The Strange Career of the Illegal Alien: Immigration Restriction and Deportation Policy in the United States, 1921–1965 in Law and History Review 21 (Spring 2003), and is reprinted with permission from University of Illinois Press. Chapter 3 is a revision of From Colonial Subject to Undesirable Alien: Filipino Migration, Exclusion, and Repatriation in Re/Collecting Asian America: Essays in Cultural History, ed. Josephine Lee, Imogene Lim, and Yuko Matsukawa (Temple University Press, 2002), and is printed with permission of the Press. Chapter 6 was published as Legacies of Exclusion: Illegal Chinese Immigration During the Cold War Years in Journal of American Ethnic History 18 (1998), and appears with permission of the editor.

    Note on Language and Terminology

    SOME READERS may object to my use of the term illegal alien, because it carries pejorative connotations. To be sure, the phrase suggests a diminution of personhood and is particularly associated with racism towards Mexicans and other Latinos and Latinas.¹ I am sensitive to these renderings and I use the term not to reproduce racist stereotypes. To the contrary, the intention of this study is to locate the historical origins of those representations; to understand how, as Walter Lippmann described in 1922, words become cue[s] for a whole train of ideas on which ultimately a vote of untold consequences may be based. Commenting on a 1920 survey in which New England college students said an alien was a person hostile to this country, a native of an unfriendly country, an enemy from a foreign land, etc., Lippmann stated, Yet the word alien is an unusually exact legal term, far more exact than words like sovereignty, independence, national honor, rights, defense, aggression, imperialism, capitalism, socialism, about which we so readily take sides ‘for’ or ‘against.’²

    Following Lippmann, I use alien and illegal alien to refer to legal subjects. Alien, in its original and most general usage, refers to that which belongs to another person or place.³ In American law, an alien is a person who is not a citizen. An illegal alien is an alien who is unlawfully present (e.g., an unauthorized border-crosser or visa-violator) or who otherwise commits a deportable offense (e.g., an alien convicted of a crime of moral turpitude, sometimes called a criminal alien). I sometimes refer to illegal aliens as undocumented migrants, in line with common contemporary usage, but it should also be understood that undocumented is a historically specific condition that is possible only when documents (most commonly a visa) are required for lawful admission, a requirement that was born under the modern regime of immigration restriction. Furthermore, not all illegal aliens are illegal because they lack documents; there are other types of unlawful presence and other grounds for deportation.

    Immigrant is also a legal status that refers to an alien who comes for permanent settlement—a legal permanent resident—and who may be naturalized as a citizen. Not all migrants are immigrants. While the legal term for foreign students, temporary workers, visitors, and the like is nonimmigrant, I prefer to use the more general term migrant because it does not privilege permanent settlement before other kinds of migration. Migrants participate variously in one-way as well as repeated movements across nation-state boundaries … for permanent or shorter- and longer-term sojourns.⁴

    Most often I refer to migrant groups in terms of their country or geographic region of origin: Mexican, Chinese, European, Asian. I distinguish migrants from U.S.-born or naturalized citizens when required by context. I use Japanese American and Chinese American as shorthand for all Japanese (or Chinese) in America. However, I do not use Mexican American in the same way, because the multigenerational/multistatus ethnic Mexican population under study here is better understood as a transnational or borderland community. I use Mexican American to refer to naturalized or native-born U.S. citizens of Mexican descent. I do not use Filipino American because for most of the period covered by this book, Filipinos and Filipinas were colonial subjects of the United States. On occasion I use terms that are outmoded or otherwise problematic if it makes sense in historical context (Negro, Asiatic, Oriental, Caucasian). Because all labels are constructs of some sort and for reasons of style, I have kept the use of scare quotes (illegal alien, Asiatic, etc.) to a minimum.

    Chinese proper names and phrases are rendered in pinyin, save for public figures whose names are known by old-style romanization (e.g., Chiang Kaishek, Kuomintang), persons whose names include an American first name, and persons whose names appear in legal records in transliterated Cantonese. Japanese proper names are written with given name first, surname second.

    The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, the federal agency that is the subject of much of this study, has a long bureaucratic history. Congress created the Bureau of Immigration in 1891 and placed it in the Department of Commerce and Labor; when that department divided in 1913 the bureau remained in the Department of Labor. The Immigration Service was the field organization of the bureau; the Border Patrol, which Congress established in 1925, was a unit of the service. In 1932 the Bureau of Immigration and Bureau of Naturalization merged to become the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). In 1940 Congress moved the INS to the Department of Justice. I have tried to keep confusion over nomenclature to a minimum; in general I have referred to the agency by the name in use at the time of the period under discussion.

    To protect their privacy I have used pseudonyms or initials when referring to individuals who appear in unpublished INS records (including transcripts of interrogations, reports of apprehensions, and records of confessions) and in field notes and correspondence in the Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study papers. Names of public officials and agency personnel have not been changed.

    Foreword to the New Paperback Edition

    This new edition of Impossible Subjects comes during a time of intensified public debate in the United States over unauthorized migration and immigration-policy reform. Existing and potential undocumented migrants continue to animate the central questions of immigration policy: legalization and the requirements of citizenship, border control and deportation, the labor market, family unity and separation. Indeed, many of the foundational issues of immigration restriction discussed in Impossible Subjects remain pertinent today. At the same time, the past ten years have seen some notable changes in American demography and politics, as well as in the field of immigration history. It seems appropriate to introduce new readers of Impossible Subjects by way of some comments on how the book fits into these changing landscapes of politics and scholarship.

    I began researching and writing about the origins of illegal immigration to the U.S. as a dissertation topic in the mid–1990s. I found those origins in the restrictive immigration laws that Congress legislated in the 1920s and the border-control measures implemented thereafter. Positive domestic law, not race, culture, or bad character, produced illegal aliens—an insight that would not be so novel but for pervasive stereotyping of Mexicans and other Latinos and Latinas in twentieth-century American society. As I examined the history and contours of restriction, my thinking was influenced by recent scholarship on the historical nature of race and the nation, two categories of modern political life commonly thought to be natural and timeless. I believed that an analysis of the historical specificities of national and racial identities would offer new ways of thinking about immigration and citizenship. But if I was aware that I was pursuing a new line of inquiry, it is only in hindsight that I appreciate how much the greater intellectual terrain was shifting. Since the mid–1990s, the frameworks and methodologies guiding American immigration history have undergone a sea change. Impossible Subjects was influenced by, and helped constitute, that change.

    The multidisciplinary field of migration studies has been at the forefront of the transnational turn that has swept the humanities and social sciences. Human migration, along with the circulation of commodities, currencies, and information, highlights the phenomenon of globalization, a multivalent concept referring generally to the interconnectedness of the world in our time (defined by communications technology, supranational organization, neoliberal market policy, etc). In a related vein, scholars have historicized the nation, in Benedict Anderson’s famous phrase, as an imagined community. With that insight also came recognition of nationalism’s abiding influence on the practice of history. With much greater sensitivity to the construction of the American nation and the place of that nation in the world, scholars have critically reconceived immigration history in both domestic and global contexts. The normative assumptions that previously underlaid American immigration history—unidirectional migration, permanent settlement, and eventual inclusion, if not full assimilation and citizenship—have virtually collapsed in the face of alternate frameworks of analysis: transnationalism, diaspora, borderlands, colonialism and post-colonialism, hybridity. These concepts inform not only the study of contemporary immigration but also a reconsideration of earlier periods, reshaping historical analysis. By showing that national boundaries have always been porous and that migration patterns have always been diverse, these histories establish a critical position against nationalist history. They also serve as a corrective to the tendency among social scientists to treat globalization as a new phenomenon.

    Transnational migration histories emphasize ongoing influence and a mixture of politics and culture in both the sending and receiving nations, often supported by multiple migration patterns. Based on deep empirical research, often in non-English language materials and in non-U.S. archival sources, this body of work reflects in part a transnational trend within the discipline of history itself: some of the best work on immigration to the United States has been done by scholars trained in non-U.S. fields of history. We now have really new portraits of migrants and transnational communities in dynamic and fluid regional worlds: Atlantic, Pacific, western hemispheric. For example, transnational histories of Chinese and Mexican male labor migrations have shown the connections of single men to families and villages left behind and the changes in gender, family, and social relations wrought by migration in both sending and receiving communities. Empire, colonialism, and imperialism are now common thematics in migration studies. This scholarship helps us understand why, for example, Dominicans in the mid-twentieth century could say, Yankee go home—and take me with you.¹

    Closely related to transnational histories but bearing a different analytic emphasis are diasporic studies, which take the United States as one of many destinations from a region of origin and compare and contrast migration experiences across the world. Initially diaspora referred to pre-modern and early-modern dispersals resulting from forced expulsions—Jewish, African, and Armenian—and their themes of banishment, alienation, and longings for home. In recent scholarship diaspora has assumed a more capacious meaning with regard to period and volition, embracing modern migrations driven by labor and trade, or by combinations of political exile and economic opportunity, in addition to the classical types. Transnational and disaporic methodologies each resituate the nation-state in global frameworks, but from different angles. Historian Kevin Kenny has sensibly urged combining the two in order to broaden our view beyond the single nation-state, while not losing the nation-state as a useful unit of analysis.²

    A third type of transnational framing concerns borderlands, especially the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Older studies of the American southwest were concerned with the role of white settlement on the frontier in American national development; Chicano/a history shifted the focus on conquest and annexation. More recent borderlands scholarship has emphasized cross-cultural exchange and trade, conflict, and change along shifting lines of power among indigenous peoples, Spanish and Mexicans and Anglo-Americans. Unlike transnational and diasporic histories that consider movement between multiple places at some distance from each other, borderlands history focuses on the dynamics of a single contact zone that overlaps the jurisdictions of neighboring nation-states. Here, two or more cultures meet, mix, and struggle, creating a hybrid social world across borders.³

    The new immigration history is also characterized by new thinking on ethnicity and race. Implicit in the older literature on immigration (and in American history generally) was the notion that Euro-American immigrants possessed ethnic identities but had no meaningful relation to race. Immigrants suffered from nativism, whereas race and racism were understood as questions of black-white (American, not immigrant) relations. In general, the assimilation paradigm marginalized the question of race in immigration studies. If some groups (Asians, Latinos) seemed slow to assimilate, the reasons for their intractability were found in deep cultural difference (with the onus implicitly placed upon the immigrants), not in structures of racial subordination. Since the 1990s, critical studies of race and racism in Asian American, Latino/a, and labor and working class history emerged as powerful influences in United States history. Scholars have shown the sources that produced and reproduced racialized identities of Asians and Latinos (that is, the perception of permanent foreignness and inability to assimilate), as well as the processes by which European immigrants developed both national (American) and racial (white) identities. This body of scholarship has helped bridge the conceptual gap between race and ethnicity, bringing greater cohesion within the field of immigration history.⁴

    These trends are all evident in Impossible Subjects, in its analysis of the production of racial knowledge and national identity, the construction of the border, and the influence of colonialism on migration policy. The book is not, strictly speaking, a transnational story; the focus is on the United States, on American law and its enforcement, and on migrants’ experiences in America. But its approach is deeply influenced by the transnational imperative to regard the United States not in isolation but in the world, as it is now common to say. Moreover, it takes a critical approach to nationalism in its historical analysis. American historical writing and political culture have a long and entrenched tradition of exceptionalism, including the idea that the United States was built upon the principle and practice of immigrant inclusion. Even if immigrants face obstacles along the way, it is believed that these obstacles are eventually overcome; Americans consider the path to full inclusion normative and evidence of the nation’s democratic nature. In contrast, Impossible Subjects points out that, illegal immigrants are a caste group that is categorically excluded from the national community. In contemporary political language, they live in the shadows and can never embark on the path to citizenship. The undocumented are an increasingly large population in the United States (11.1 million at this writing). They are members of families that also include citizens and legal immigrants; they are part of communities, and they are a mainstay of low-skilled labor in agriculture, construction, and the service industries. In a liberal society that values the moral and legal equality of all persons, the undocumented are impossible subjects, persons whose presence is a social reality yet a legal impossibility. Their impossibility can be resolved in only one of two ways—legalization of status or expulsion. Moreover, the historical and contemporary association of Asians and Latino/as with illegal immigration and exclusion is also the grounds for their racialization as permanent outsiders. Impossible Subjects sought to explain how formal immigration status (or lack thereof) and the categories of restriction produced new racial knowledge and new ethno-racial identity formations in the interwar period.⁵

    Some may concede these problems but consider them exceptions to an otherwise sound tradition of inclusion. Impossible Subjects argues that illegal immigration is not anomalous but inherent to the regime of immigration restriction. Nor is it a side channel to the main stream of the nation’s history as a nation of immigrants. In fact, that trope is a relatively recent invention, which emerged in the decades after World War II, when Euro-American ethnics, especially those whose forebears had immigrated in the early twentieth century, made their own claims of belonging. They celebrated their own rise to the middle class and political legitimacy and declared their experience typical of American history. The first two generations of immigration history scholarship canonized that view as a normative theory of immigration. But with historical distance we can now see that their success was the product of a specific moment in American history: the assimilation of the second generation of new immigrants in the post-World War II era was made possible by unprecedented American economic growth and global power, a steady decline in wealth inequality (1947–1974), and the generosity of the American welfare state, in particular, higher education and homeownership for World War II veterans.⁶ The theme of universal inclusion and citizenship could be read back onto the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries only by bracketing the conquest of Native Americans, slavery, southwestern annexation, Asiatic exclusion, Jim Crow, and the acquisition of unincorporated territories (colonies). Indeed, the experience of the new immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century, as well as that generally of non-European migrants throughout American history, was marked by exploitation in a segmented labor market, political exclusion, social isolation, and nativist opposition. Even the Fourteenth Amendment’s provision of birthright citizenship to all persons born in the United States, including the children of immigrants—the foundation for the second generation’s access to the polity—has proved viable only under favorable conditions that are at once economic (expansion), demographic (concentration of voters), and political (foreign relations and domestic social movements). Perhaps, as historian David Gutíerrez suggests, immigration in the early twenty-first century, with its high incidence of labor exploitation and political exclusion, is the new normal.⁷

    From this angle, the prospects for democratic inclusion—now as in the past—are certainly not foreclosed, but must be understood not as organic or inevitable. Rather, they reside in conditions of possibility that are chiefly political, domestic and global. As I discuss in Impossible Subjects, illegal aliens have been able to legalize their status at certain moments—Europeans during the 1930s and 1940s, Chinese during the Cold War, Mexicans and others in the mid-1980s. In the two decades after World War II Euro-Americans fought their own civil-rights battle to repeal the national origins quotas, finally succeeding in 1965 with passage of the Hart-Celler Act. Their triumph resulted from a constellation of political factors: the rise of Euro-American ethnics as important voting constituents in the urban industrial north; robust domestic-social movements (labor and civil rights); and the international embarrassment of discriminatory immigration quotas during the Cold War. But, if the abolition of national origins quotas in 1965 was an inclusionary reform, Hart-Celler was also an illiberal act because it continued the regime of numerical restriction and imposed it on the entire world, especially upon the countries of the Western Hemisphere, which previously had no numerical limitations. The global nature of restriction and the application of equal limits on all countries, regardless of size, need, or relationship to the United States, reflected the ethos of formal equality of the civil rights era. Ironically it has been the single most important reason for unauthorized migration since 1965.⁸ The Immigration and Control Act of 1986 legalized nearly three million undocumented immigrants, but because IRCA did not change the basic structures of restriction, unauthorized entry continued and in fact soared from 1990s to the late 2000s as part of the United States’ long economic boom.

    When Impossible Subjects was published in 2004, the prospects for the undocumented seemed dim. Ongoing economic expansion continued to draw unauthorized migrants, especially from Mexico and Central America, for work in low-skilled and low-waged jobs. But, at the same time, official and popular hostility against unauthorized migrants ran high. Since the mid-1990s the U.S.-Mexico border had undergone an unprecedented militarization. The numbers of apprehensions, detentions, and removals steadily increased into the new century. Between 2000 and 2005, over one thousand migrants died while trying to enter the country across the Arizona desert.⁹ In December 2005, the U.S. House of Representatives passed an immigration bill that would have criminalized unauthorized migrants and anyone who assisted them, including humanitarian workers who left bottles of water in the desert.¹⁰ The bill did not become law because it did not pass the Senate, but it ignited a new immigrant rights movement, led by immigrants themselves, legal and illegal. In May 2006, several million people participated in protests across the country, including hundreds of thousands in Los Angeles and Chicago and high school walk outs in several states, mobilized by Spanish-language radio, the Catholic Church, labor unions, student networks, and hometown associations. Their slogans expressed a politics of human and civil rights and the claims of belonging that come with living and working in America: No human being is illegal, We are America, and, presciently, Today we march, tomorrow we vote.

    Over the next several years three trends emerged that have altered the political landscape and created new possibilities for legalization and immigration-law reform. The first trend was the growth of the Latino/a population and its electoral power. In 2012, the Census Bureau estimated fifty-three million Hispanics in the U.S., 17 percent of the U.S. population. Moreover, contrary to stereotype, not all Latinos/as are undocumented. In fact, more than half are native born and nearly 75 percent of all Latino/as are U.S. citizens, either by native-birth or naturalization. Importantly, Latino/as comprise significant voting constituencies in states that previously voted Republican but tipped to Democratic in the 2008 and 2012 Presidential elections (Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, Florida, Virginia, North Carolina [2008]).¹¹

    Second, a robust social movement of immigrant workers has emerged, sometimes allied with but also autonomous from, and occasionally in tension with, traditional organized labor. This movement has been building since the 1990s among Mexican, Central American, Chinese, Pakistani, and other immigrant workers. High-profile campaigns like Justice for Janitors to unionize Latino/a immigrant workers in Los Angeles overturned the conventional wisdom that immigrants could not be organized. Indeed, the opposite has proven true, that immigrants, including the unauthorized, are more likely to be receptive to unionizing efforts than native-born workers. Immigrant workers also have organized in community-based worker centers, which are not unions but pursue similar goals of economic advancement. During the first decade of the century, worker centers grew prolifically among immigrant labor especially in areas where employers routinely flout wage and hour laws, such as day labor and garment sweatshops. The centers help workers sue for unpaid wages and more broadly advocate for economic justice. Immigrant workers, both legal and unauthorized and members of both unions and worker centers were a major force in the 2006 mass mobilizations for immigrant rights. In turn, the immigrant rights movement has further propelled labor organizing. Sociologist Ruth Milkman has aptly described the post-2006 immigrant rights movement as both a civil rights movement and a labor movement.¹²

    Finally, there are the dreamers. These are the nearly two million undocumented young adults, who came to the U.S. with their parents when they were young children; they essentially grew up as Americans but have no legal status.¹³ The predicament of their impossibility is partially addressed by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Plyler v. Doe (1982), which recognized the constitutional right of all children to public education regardless of immigration status. But Plyler also further exacerbates their predicament because although education brought greater social and cultural integration, they remain without lawful status. Upon graduating from high school they could not go to college or get a job, obtain a driver’s license, open a bank account, or travel abroad—the common indices of becoming an adult that most Americans take for granted.

    The activism of undocumented youth for access to higher education led to the introduction of the DREAM Act (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors) in the U.S. Congress in 2001. While federal legislation stalled over the next dozen years, fifteen state-level dream acts made unauthorized students eligible for in-state tuition fees at state universities.¹⁴ Still lacking federal legislation in 2012, President Barack Obama established an administrative program of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. DACA provided legalization (with authorization to work) for those younger than thirty years of age, who arrived before 2007 and before their sixteenth birthday, and who have a high school education.¹⁵

    The student dreamers’ movement, begun as a quest for education, by the late 2000s grew into a broader call for legalization and immigration law reform. By 2013, the movement had grown to seventy-five state and local dreamers’ organizations and two nation-wide networks. Dream activists engage in legislative lobbying as well as radical acts of coming out and civil disobedience. They march under the sign, undocumented, unafraid, and unapologetic. Like the second generation of Euro-American ethnics that sought to repeal the national origins quotas after World War II, the dream activists are also the acculturated children of immigrants. They took civics classes in high school and learned about the movements for female suffrage and black civil rights. Indeed the language of the dream and coming out resonate with both the civil rights and gay rights movements. Many of the dreamers have experience in high school and college student governments and organizations. They know, as dream activist-leader Gaby Pacheco explains, how to navigate politics and society.¹⁶

    Trained in organizing, lobbying, and media skills, the dream activists have promoted a compelling message that highlights the injustice of their impossibility. They tell personal stories—stories of their dreams of becoming a teacher, or lawyer, or nurse; the high school valedictorian, who won a scholarship but could not go to college. They speak of the pain of watching a parent or sibling deported or their despair at facing a diminished future. They tell their stories because we know the power of our narrative, explained Gaby Pacheco. The dreamers’ identification as Americans, the innocence of their childhood migration, and their academic and civic achievements have elicited sympathy throughout American society. At the same time, Pacheco concedes that portraying the dreamers as deserving implicitly casts others—including their parents—as undeserving lawbreakers. They try to counter this by fighting for legalization for all unauthorized migrants. In fact, the dream activists’ work has been crucial in swaying American public opinion to support legalization and a path to citizenship for all the undocumented.¹⁷

    These trends of demography, electoral politics, and social activism burgeoned in the decade since Impossible Subjects was first published. Although I could not have predicted the specifics of how they would develop, they were foretold by general historical patterns—unauthorized entry as an invariable consequence of restrictive policy; the racial dynamics that regard some immigrants only for their labor and not as full persons and members of society; the role of immigrants themselves as social and political actors. I have been fortunate that Impossible Subjects has counted among its readers, college students, graduate students, and scholars; as well as immigrant-rights activists who are finding historical context and lessons for their own work. I hope they will all continue to find it useful. Many thanks to Princeton University Press and Brigitta van Rheinberg for this second edition. I am grateful for her support and loyalty over the years. I thank also my students, colleagues, friends, and family, and especially JGN, who continue to brighten my intellectual and personal life.

    Washington, D.C.

    Notes

    1. Parts of this foreword are drawn from my essay, Immigration and Ethnic History, in American History Now, ed. Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr (American Historical Association and Temple University Press, 2011) and appear with the permission of the American Historical Association.

    Quote from Jesse Hoffnung-Garskoff, A Tale of Two Cities: Santo Domingo and New York after 1950 (Princeton 2008). Other exemplary works of transnational migration history include Alison Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (HUP 1999); Madeline Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration between the US and South China, 1882–1943 (Stanford 2000); Robert C. Smith, Mexican New York: Transnational Lives of New Immigrants (California 2006); Deborah Cohen, Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in Post-war U.S. and Mexico (UNC 2011); Eiichiro Azuma, Between Two Empires: Race, History and Transnationalism in Japanese America (Oxford 2005); Moon-Ho Jung, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Johns Hopkins 2006); Catherine Ceniza Choy, Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American history (Duke 2003).

    2. Philip Kuhn, Chinese among Others: Emigration in Modern Times (Rowman and Littlefield 2008); Donna Gabaccia and Fraser Ottanelli, Italian Workers of the World: Labor Migration and the Formation of Multethnic States (Illinois 2001); Sandhya Shukla, India Abroad: Diasporic Cultures of Postwar America and England (Princeton 2003); Rebecca Kobrin, Jewish Bialystock and its Diaspora (Indiana 2010); Kevin Kenny, Diaspora and Comparison: The Irish as a Case-Study, Journal of American History 90 (June 2003): 134–162.

    3. Ramón Gutierrez, When Jesus Came the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846 (Stanford 1991); James Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (UNC 2002); Maria Montoya, Translating Property: The Maxwell Land Grant and the Conflict over Land in the American West (California 2002, Kansas 2005); Andrés Reséndez, Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800–1850 (Cambridge UP 2005); Kelly Lytle Hernandez, Migra! (California 2010); Katherine Benton-Cohen, Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands (HUP 2009); Rachel St. John, Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.-Mexico Border (Princeton 2012). On the formation of borderlands in the Pacific Northwest, Kornel Chang, Pacific Connections: The Making of the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands (California 2012).

    4. David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (Verso 1991); James Barrett and David Roediger,‘In-between Peoples’: Race, Nationality, and the ‘New Immigrant’ working Class, Journal of American Ethnic History (Spring 1997): 3–47; David Gutíerrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (California 1995); George Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (Oxford 1995); Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Duke 1996); Matthew Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Harvard 1998); John Kuo-wei Tchen, New York Before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture 1776–1882 (Johns Hopkins 1999); Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton 2001); Thomas Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Race, Color and Power in Chicago, 1890–1945 (Oxford 2003); Mary Ting Yi Lui, The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn of the Century New York (Princeton 2005); Russell Kazal, Becoming Old Stock: The Paradox of German American Identit y (Princeton 2004); Karen Leong, The China Mystique: Pearl S. Buck, Anna May Wong, Mayling Soong, and the Transformation of American Orientalism (California 2005); Victoria Hattam, In the Shadow or Race: Jews, Latinos and Immigrant Politics in the U.S. (Chicago 2007); Sarah Gualtieri, Between Arab and White: Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian American Diaspora (California 2009).

    5. The undocumented population peaked at 12 million in 2007 then fell to 11.1 million in 2009 as a result of the U.S. economic recession; that number has remained stable since. Jeffrey Passel and D’Vera Cohen, Unauthorized Immigrants: 11.1 in 2011, PEW Hispanic Research Center, Dec. 6, 2012, http://www.pew​hispanic​.org​/2012​/12​/06​/un​authorized​-immigrants​-11​–1​-million​-in-2011/ (accessed Aug. 27, 2013). According to national polling data, 64 to 78 percent of Americans support legalization of status and a pathway to citizenship for the undocumented. http://www.polling​report​.com​/immigration.htm (accessed Aug. 27, 2014).

    6. Scholars have also shown that the assimilation of Euro-Americans, was more limited and slower than generally believed, with post-war benefits accruing to the latter birth cohorts of the second generation (born after 1920) or the third generation. Nancy Foner and Richard Alba, The Second Generation from the Last Great Wave of Immigration: Setting the Record Straight Migration Information Source, October 2006, www.Migration​information.org (last accessed Sept. 5, 2013); Joel Perlmann, Italians then, Mexicans now (Russell Sage 2005); Miriam Cohen, Workshop to Office (Cornell 1992).

    7. David Gutíerrez, The New Normal? Reflections on the Shifting Politics of the Immigration debate, International Labor and Working Class History 78 (Fall 2010), 118–122. On economic stagnation of Mexican Americans from 1965–2000, despite marked trends of acculturation (English-language acquisition and increased out-marriage), see Edward Telles and Vilma Ortiz, Generations of Exclusion: Mexican Americans, Assimilation and Race (Russell Sage 2008). Telles and Ortiz’s findings implicate failing urban public schools and persistent segmentation in the labor market as key reasons for Mexican Americans’ lack of socio-economic mobility in the late twentieth century.

    8. Mae M. Ngai, The Civil Rights Origins of Illegal Immigration, International Labor and Working Class History 78 (Fall 2010), 93–99.

    9. For detailed analysis of border control and other mechanisms of enforcement from the 1990s to 2013 see Doris Meissner, Donald M. Kerwin, Muzaffar Chisti, and Clare Bergamon, Immigration Enforcement: The Rise of a Formidable Machinery (Migration Policy Institute 2013), http://www.no​more​deaths​.org/information​/deaths.html (last accessed Sept. 5, 2013). The cumulative total of deaths related to desert-border crossings between 2000 and 2013 is at least 2,666.

    10. The Border Protection, Anti-terrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005 (H.R. 4437).

    11. National Council of La Raza, 20 FAQ about Hispanics, http://www.nclr​.org​/index.php​/about​_us​/faqs​/most​_frequently​_asked​_questions​_about​_hispanics​_​in​_the_us/ (last accessed Sept. 5, 2013); Mark Hugo Lopez and Ana Gonzalez-Barrera, Inside the Latino Electorate, Pew Hispanic Research Center, June 3, 2013, http://www.pew​hispanic​.org​/2013​/06​/03​/inside​-the​-2012​-latino​-electorate/ (last accessed Sept. 5, 2013).

    12. Ruth Milkman, LA Story: Immigrant Workers and the Future of the American Labor Movement (Russell Sage, 2006); Jennifer Gordon, Suburban Sweatshops: The Fight for Immigrant Rights (Harvard 2005); Janice Fine, Worker Centers: Organizing Communities at the Edge of the Dream (Economic Policy Institute, 2006).

    13. Who and Where the Dreamers Are, Immigration Policy Institute, Oct. 2012, http://www.immigration​policy.org​/just​-facts​/who​-and​-where​-dreamers​-are​-revised​-estimates (accessed Sept. 9, 2013) and Batalova, Hooker and Capps, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals at the One-year Mark, MPI Issue Brief, August 2013, http://www.migration​policy.org​/pubs​/cirbrief​-dacaat​one​year.pdf (accessed Sept. 9, 2013).

    14. California, Texas, New York, Utah, Washington, Oklahoma, Illinois, Kansas, New Mexico, Nebraska, Maryland, Connecticut, Colorado, Minnesota, and Oregon. National Conference of State Legislatures, Allow In-State Tuition for Undocumented Students, July 2013, http://www.ncsl.org/issues-research/educ/undocumented-student-tuition-state-action.aspx (accessed Sept. 9, 2013)

    15. In the first year of DACA, 637,000 people applied, or 59 percent of the eligible population. Batalova et al, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals at One-year Mark.

    16. Author interview with Gaby Pacheco, Sept. 9, 2013, Washington DC. See also Walter Nicholls, The DREAMers: How the Undocumented Youth Movement Transformed the Immigrant Rights Movement (Stanford 2013); Hinda Seif, Unapologetic and Unafraid: Immigrant Youth Come out of the Shadows, New Directions in Childhood and Adolescent Development 134 (2011): 59–75; René Galindo, Embodying the Gap between National Inclusion and Exclusion: The Testimonios of Three Undocumented Students at a 2007 Congressional Hearing, 14 Harv. Lat. Law Rev. 377 (2011).

    17. Pacheco interview. Polling data in 2012 and 2013 show 66 to 78 percent of respondents supporting some kind of legalization. http://www.polling​report.com/immigration.htm (accessed Sept. 16, 2013)

    IMPOSSIBLE SUBJECTS

    ____________________________________________________

    Introduction

    Illegal Aliens: A Problem of Law and History

    IN 2001 THE UNITED STATES Immigration and Naturalization Service ordered Rosario Hernandez of Garland, Texas, deported to his native Mexico. Hernandez, a 39-year-old construction worker, had immigrated to Texas from Guadalajara, Mexico, when he was a teenager. His removal was ordered on grounds that he had been convicted three times for driving while intoxicated—twice nearly twenty years ago and once ten years later. After the third conviction Hernandez served five weekends in jail, joined Alcoholics Anonymous, and gave up drinking. However, according to laws passed by Congress in 1996 the multiple convictions amounted to an aggravated felony and made his removal mandatory, not subject to review by a judge. Hernandez considered the deportation unfair: I already paid for my mistakes, he said, How can they punish somebody two times for the same thing?

    Hernandez is married to a U.S. citizen and has two children, who are also American citizens. His wife Renee said, I respect him for admitting to his mistakes and changing his life. What people don’t realize is that this was a surprise attack on my life, as well. We have a baby here whose whole person is forming. He changes every day, and you want both parents to be a part of that. Hernandez’s older son, Adrian, asks, Where is my daddy going to be?¹

    When I read Hernandez’s story I was struck by its resemblance to another story that I had come across while researching this book. In the early 1930s the INS ordered Mrs. Lillian Joann Flake, a longtime resident of Chicago, deported to her native Canada. Like Hernandez, Flake was married to an American citizen and had a daughter, also a citizen. She had a record of theft and shoplifting, which the INS considered crimes of moral turpitude. Flake’s deportation was canceled by an act of grace by Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins. The 1996 laws, however, explicitly deny administrative relief in cases like Hernandez’s.²

    Then, as now, legal reformers and immigrant advocates publicized deportation stories like these in order to call attention to what they believed was a problem in American immigration policy. Reformers argued that the nation’s sovereign right to determine the conditions under which foreigners enter and remain in the country runs into trouble when the government expels people who have acquired families and property in the United States. They found cases like Hernandez’s and Flake’s compelling because embedded in their narratives were normative judgments that esteem the immigrant’s integration into society and the sanctity of the family. Deportation, which devalues assimilation—indeed cancels it—and separates families, seemed draconian punishment for crimes of drunk driving and petty theft. In Flake’s time, reformers wrote almost exclusively about deportation cases involving Europeans and paid scant attention, if any, to the deportation of Mexican or Chinese criminal aliens. Nowadays, however, non-European cases like Hernandez’s also receive public sympathy, especially when they involve rehabilitated criminals who are longtime permanent residents with families. This shift reflects the increase in the number of immigrants from the third world over the last quarter century and contemporary multicultural sensibilities.

    We ought not rush to the conclusion, however, that race no longer operates in either the practice or representation of deportation. Then, as now, few reformers advocated for those aliens who entered the country by crossing the border without authorization. That preoccupation has focused on the United States–Mexico border and therefore on illegal immigrants from Mexico and Central America, suggesting that race and illegal status remain closely related.

    But we might ask, first, what it is about the violation of the nation’s sovereign space that produces a different kind of illegal alien and a different valuation of the claims that he or she can make on society? Unauthorized entry, the most common form of illegal immigration since the 1920s, remains vexing for both state and society. Undocumented immigrants are at once welcome and unwelcome: they are woven into the economic fabric of the nation, but as labor that is cheap and disposable. Employed in western and southwestern agriculture during the middle decades of the twentieth century, today illegal immigrants work in every region of the United States, and not only as farmworkers. They also work in poultry factories, in the kitchens of restaurants, on urban and suburban construction crews, and in the homes of middle-class Americans. Marginalized by their position in the lower strata of the workforce and even more so by their exclusion from the polity, illegal aliens might be understood as a caste, unambiguously situated outside

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